Not Your Grandma’s Healthcare System

During recent months, in which trashing the British National Health Service has become de rigueur among opponents of healthcare reform, I’ve been thinking a lot about my late, beloved Grandma.  She died in 1996.  But in the early 1990s, knowing that she might not live too many years longer, I asked her if she’d talk on tape about her life history. And Grandma, never a woman reticent to talk about herself, agreed. So, one rainy afternoon in the terraced house she shared with my grandfather in an English seaside town, we sat in her middle room drinking tea from her best china, I placed a tape recorder between us, and she told me about her life.

My grandmother grew up in Marfleet, at that time a village outside the Yorkshire city of Hull.  She grew up poor—her father was employed as a dock worker unloading cargo from the ships at the nearby docks on the River Humber—but she regarded herself as well off then because she was among the kids who always had shoes and enough to eat. Grandma had wanted desperately to be a teacher, but there was no money for an education. Instead, she left school as a young teenager to sell sarsaparilla outside the Salt End chemical refinery, a little further up the river from the docks, to the men who worked there, which is where she met my grandfather.  Together, they watched the total eclipse of the sun on the morning of June 29^th, 1927 outside Salt End, and that evening they went on their first date.   

Married on the verge of the Great Depression, like so many of her generation, Grandma had to raise a young family in extreme poverty. Managing a severely underfinanced household carved certain things into her memory: when I interviewed her sixty years later, she could still recall the exact price of butter, potatoes, bread, tea, milk and corned beef, how much the weekly rent was, and the cost of every item of furniture that they bought. She told me about having to scrimp and save to buy the soap and other basic necessities for childbirth, about how having a midwife was a luxury. She talked about how calling out the doctor meant financial disaster, and how, often, she simply could not afford to buy medicine for a sick child. 

Then the war came.  Just three weeks after the invasion of Poland by Germany, my grandmother’s seventh child (my mother) was born. The next six years involved enduring terrifying air raids (the city of Hull, where Grandma was living, had ninety percent of its buildings destroyed or damaged by German bombs), coping with rationing, having to run a household alone, and dealing with all the privations and difficulties of war. 

As I interviewed my grandmother, I imagined how frightened she must have been of a Nazi invasion, how tedious it was to put up the blackout curtains every night, how rationing must have made it even more challenging to feed a large family, and how fearful she must have been for Granddad, who was away, fighting in the Royal Marines.  So it was a surprise to me when I asked her, “How did you feel when the war ended, Grandma?” and the first thing she talked about was the National Health Service, put in place by the new Labour government soon after the conflict was over. 

More than anything, it was this (along with the child cash allowances and other innovations of the postwar government that shielded British families from the depths of poverty) that transformed my grandmother’s life.  After 1945, she never had to worry about not being able to pay the doctor or purchase needed medication for her children.  Illness might be a tragedy, but it could no longer plunge her family into severe financial crisis.  As she talked about this, all those years later, the relief was still palpable in my grandmother’s voice.

It likely took World War II for Britain to put in place the National Health Service.  Before the conflict, Britain had been a rigid class society. The experience of joint sacrifice and unity against a common enemy softened those class barriers. A different understanding of the country’s common welfare emerged. By the time the war ended, all the major political parties were committed to creating a National Health System of some sort. And, because the government had largely done a good job of directing the war effort, it made sense to put it in charge of delivering health services to its citizens as well. 

For fifty years of her later life, my grandmother had access to the healthcare she needed. It had become a right, not a privilege—for Grandma and the entire British population. Even during the peak of Margaret Thatcher’s power, when privatization and the rolling back of long-established rights was undertaken in almost every sector, Thatcher understood that the National Health Service was one of the few state-run institutions that Britons would not allow her to destroy. 

At the age of eighty-six, a few years after I had interviewed her, my grandma suffered a massive stroke.  She was taken to the hospital in a National Health ambulance.  She was treated compassionately and kindly, and with great skill by National Health doctors and nurses.  There were no death panels or advocates for euthanasia waiting in the wings. The medical personnel tried their best to save her, but two days later, she died. She had lived a difficult, but long and satisfying life.

As my grandmother’s grandchild and an immigrant to the United States from Britain, the way that the U.S. deals with healthcare has long been a source of anger and bewilderment to me.  The terms of the current healthcare debate are particularly mysterious. I live in a country that is the richest in the history of the world. And yet, here, people frequently do not seek healthcare for the simple reason that they cannot afford it. Families go bankrupt by the millions as a consequence of illness. People worry that paying for their medications will mean that they have to go without other necessities. Many, for financial reasons, do not access preventive care at all.  And yet, opponents of healthcare reform have made Britain’s healthcare system their bete noire?  This makes no sense to me.  After all, sixty-four years ago, thanks to the National Health Service, my grandmother (and every man, woman and child in Britain) left these problems behind.

Proposition Hate

Last week, I opened the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle to see a photograph of a pro-Proposition 8 rally held near Fresno.  The attendees were celebrating the California Supreme Court’s recent ruling that said that a bare majority of California voters is allowed to bar same-sex partners from getting married. 

 Inset into the article was a photograph of someone holding up a sign that showed a hand-drawn picture of woman (you could tell it was a woman because she had a big hairdo and was wearing a tent-shaped dress) and a man, then the equals sign and then the word MARRIAGE. Below that there was another drawing of a man, a woman and two little kiddies, then an equals sign and then the word FAMILY. 

 So, just to restate the equation, man plus woman equals marriage; man plus woman plus kiddies equals family. 

 Ah, yes, I’m so glad we got that clear. 

 Because, frankly, I’ve been rather confused about what to call the conglomeration of folks who live in my household.  At least I know we’re not a family.  Instead, we are… well, we’re a collection of individuals held together by nothing more than love, caring, loyalty, attachment, and the need for company and companionship.  Unlike all those “real” families out there. 

 There’s my partner and I.  We’ve been together fifteen years this year.  (Well, I say “together” a little loosely these days because she’s flying back and forth to Germany to spend a month at a time taking care of her aging parents.  But I shouldn’t mind about that because we’re not a “real” marriage anyway, so what difference should it make to us?) 

 And there’s our goddaughter, a beautiful young woman of eighteen who just graduated high school and whom we call our goddaughter because she calls us her “fairy godmothers” (in the Cinderella sense, not the queer-fairy-pervert sense, just to be clear).  She calls us her godmothers in part because when her “real” family fell apart and her “real” father threw her out with literally nowhere to go, she asked us if she could move in with us and we said yes. 

 She’d been warned about us—my partner and I—of course.  When she was younger (we’ve known her since she was eight years old), she was told by neighbors that we were perverts and warned by members of her “real” family, that we could likely molest her.  Still, despite all this, she and her siblings kept on coming over to our house to visit, to hang out, to be in a place where there were adults who liked them and helped them with their homework and took them out to the movies or the beach at weekends.  (And, just in case you’re wondering—because apparently people do—we did not molest any of them and would likely have beaten someone who did near to death). 

 We also have a dog.  Not a “real” family dog, of course.  Not a “family” dog at all (remember our equation).  Just a dog who happens to have been scooped up, flea-ridden and sad-eyed, from the streets of Oakland and taken in.  (I’m sure he’d have preferred a heterosexual household, but given his options at the time, he took what he could get.)

Do I sound a little bitter?  Filled with sour irony?  Well, hell, yeah.  

But at least I don’t need to pump myself up by making out that what I am and what I have—my household, my relationships, the people (and the pets) I keep around me—is any better than that which belongs to anyone else.

The Past is a Foreign Country

 

 

 

Queen Victoria atop the public loos in the center of Hull.

In December of last year, I took a trip to England.  I went to Hull, the city I was born in. Hull’s a funny place in a lot of ways. Set on the banks of the Humber Estuary, a few miles from the East Yorkshire coast (and about 158 miles north of London), it’s Britain’s 12th biggest city, but even a very large portion of Brits are barely aware of it. Hull’s also one of the largest ports in the country, with a centuries’ long history of being visited by ships and sailors from all over the world, yet it’s very culturally conservative and has one of the most homogeneous populations of any urban area in the country. When I lived there, it was more than 99 percent white. It’s changed in the last couple of decades, with people of color now making up about 4 percent of the city’s population. Still, if you feel the urge to wander among crowds of pasty-faced white people, go to Hull in the middle of December.  

 

Hull’s also got a bit of a bad reputation. In 2003, it was named number one on The Crap Map, a guide to the worst places to live in Britain. Hull’s poverty rates are among the highest in the country and its wages are the lowest. It’s got quite a drug problem these days, as well as more than its share of vandalism and violent crime. The local schools aren’t doing very well either. 

 

It hasn’t always been that bad. Hull was once a thriving industrial city. But, as was the case for many cities in northern England, decline set in during the 1970s. When I was a teenager I witnessed the death of Hull’s deep sea fishing industry (Hull had been the biggest fishing port in Europe), the decimation of its manufacturing, and saw a large portion of the kids I knew leave school, sign on the dole and stay there for a long time. There was a terrible, stagnant feel about the place then—at least to me. I knew that if I wanted to do anything with my life I needed to get away.

 

Within a few months of moving to London to go to university I had deliberately lost my Hull accent. (Hull has a very distinctive accent. Many of my fellow students—most of whom came from nice middle class families in the south—literally fell about laughing when I said certain words or phrases.) And, about a year later, after my parents moved to a town about 30 miles from Hull, I barely ever went back. 

 

So it was a little strange to return there last December. But I had to. Not out of obligation, but because the city had pulled me to it. I was doing research for my new novel, which is set in Hull.

 

It’s funny how the imagination does that, taking you to places that you’d consciously never choose to go. Novels take years to write and while you’re writing them in some ways you inhabit their settings. I’d told myself I was going to set my next book in California, the place I’ve lived for the last twenty years. But somehow my imagination kept veering back to Hull. I resisted it. I tried to ignore it. But still it kept making my writing go there.

 

It was annoying. And inconvenient. Not long after I’d given up fighting and taken on the project, I realized I needed to go back to Hull to do some research if I was going to do it right. 

 

It was a little frightening going back, especially alone. Hull’s a place I associate with the past and with family. Since I’d left there I’d lost a lot of relatives: grandparents, aunts, uncles, great aunts.  My Auntie Jean had died earlier that year. Just a little more than three and a half years before there’d been the sudden death of my mother. And my last trip to Hull—for a day in 2006—had been with my father. He already had Alzheimer’s by then but had still been able to talk, enjoy the tour we’d taken of the Maritime Museum and the Art Gallery, reminiscence about his boyhood and tell me his early memories of the city. By December 2008, he was unable to string sentences together. If I’d taken him to Hull he wouldn’t have recognized it, the same way he no longer recognized me. Now, aside from one of my father’s longtime best friends, there really wasn’t anyone I knew there. I was traveling, essentially, to a place full of strangers.

 

 

 

The lock gates at the abandoned St. Andrews fish dock.

I flew to Heathrow, spent one night in a hotel close to Kings Cross, and then took the train up to Hull the next day. When I arrived there I had no idea what to expect. The city’s changed, of course. Some of it for the better, some for the worst. I didn’t care much for the massive new mall with the multi-screen cinema or the array of big box stores close to the site of the old fish dock (too much like the very worst of suburban United States). Nor was I very impressed by the giant television with a price tag of well over a million quid that had been put up in Victoria Square. Apparently this was the city council’s effort to create something in the city that “brought people together.” As if getting everyone to stop ogling the box in their living rooms and instead zone out on telly in the city center is some kind of meaningful civic activity. I was also sad to see Fletcher’s, a longstanding local bakery, replaced by a Starbucks. 

 

But there were some good changes, like the spruced-up old town, the new museums, and the local history center that’s being built near the city center. And the new bus station seems to work very well, much better than the old one where being hit by a bus had become something of a regular hazard for passengers making their way to their stop. 

 

There were also a lot of things that had not changed. The weekend binge drinking I indulged in when I was a teen is still alive and well among the young people there now. There still aren’t too many good restaurants (though I did stumble upon an absolutely fabulous Indian place on Princes Avenue). The local accent is still as thick and distinctive as ever. And, once again, people are still being laid off from their jobs in droves. (I arrived shortly after the sharp downturn in the economy and the local news every night was filled with tales of local factory closings and redundancies.)

 

Fortunately for me, one thing has also held true over all the years: Hull folk are remarkably warm and helpful. I had shown up in the city with only vague plans, having contacted a couple of local historians by email and a few other people through an article I managed to get placed in the Hull Daily Mail. Upon arrival, I had one or two appointments set up, a few phone numbers, and a promise from some of my email contacts that they could put me in touch with some people who would probably be helpful. And all of them came through.  

Chimneys on the now-disused fish house along Hessle Road.

 

The book I’m working on is set from around 1936 onwards in the tight-knit fishing community that existed around Hull’s Hessle Road. It’s where my father grew up; I lived there for a while as a child with my grandparents. It’s a place that’s been described as “a village within a city” by some people. I never thought about it much at all until after my mother died.  But when I began to talk to my father and other relatives on his side of the family about what it had been like to grow up there, my interest in the area started to grow. 

 

While I was in Hull I talked to an enormous number of people. There was Rob, the maritime historian, who gave me a tour of the area around the old fish dock and told me of the excitement of meeting his father there when he arrived home after a three-week fishing trip. There was Freda, the eighty-two year old who used to play piano in the Hessle Road pubs. She and I spent most of a day together. She played and sang for me despite her crippling arthritis, and shared with me the challenges of raising two boys and caring for her mentally ill husband until he committed suicide in their garden shed. There was her son, Tommy, who gave me close to forty hours of material on DVD: the fishing trawlers at sea, the streets of Hessle Road, Hull during the war. 

 

There was the ex-trawler skipper, Jim, who now volunteers on the Arctic Corsair, a refurbished sidewinder trawler that’s docked in Hull and operates as a museum. Jim spent hours with me, giving me a tour of the boat and telling me about the dangers and intensity of captaining a trawler in stormy Arctic waters in January. There was Jon, the young man who helps out at the museum who presented me with a rare book on the lives of wartime trawlermen that I’d been trying to get hold of for months. And there was Ron, another former trawlerman who shared intimate details of his upbringing and his close scrapes with death at sea. 

 

There were the groups of women I met in two local retirement homes. Aged from seventy to ninety-five, they reminded me of teenagers the way they laughed and talked raucously over one another as they told me stories about what it was like living through the Blitz. There was Doctor Drummond, 102 years old and sharp as a knife, who told me about the horror and stress of delivering medical care during the bombings. There was Teresa, who had lost her husband in Hull’s triple trawler disaster in 1968 and who had joined the women who campaigned to change the awful working conditions on the boats that had contributed to it. And there was Mac, a former fisherman and landlord of a pub on Hessle Road who talked to me at length, invited me to Sunday lunch with his family, and gave me a stack of books on Hessle Road and the fishing industry. “More use to you than me,” he said. 

 

 

 

The refurbished Princes Dock.

There were many others, too many to mention. I spent eight days traveling around the city from interview to interview, trying to fit in a few hours of research in the local history library which would be closing soon so that the collection could be moved to its new home at the end of next year. For the first time in years, jetlag didn’t seem to leave me dopey in the daytimes. I was fascinated by everything I heard. 

 

I got some great material. And, perhaps more importantly, I had a wonderful time. Sure, it was damp and chilly and dark not much after four in the afternoon, and apart from the Indian place it was almost impossible to find meals that involved vegetables that weren’t canned or flavorless or both. But the people were fantastic. Generous with their time, their stories, their lives, they made me feel welcome in a place I had essentially abandoned almost thirty years before. 

 

There were times that it was hard to be there. Walking down the Boulevard and remembering doing that with my petite and gentle grandmother when I was five years old. Stopping during my tour of the area with Rob to look at my grandparents’ old house on Queen’s Gate Street, the house I had lived in and my father had grown up in after their house in one of the terraces by the river had been bombed. Walking past the statue of Queen Victoria atop the public toilets and and remembering all the times I’d walked past there with my mother. Dragging my suitcase through the railway station and recalling all the times I’d arrived there and all the times I’d left. Witnessing all the changes in the city—good and bad—and realizing that no matter how far you travel you can never revisit the past. 

 

Except in fiction. Which is why, I suspect, Hull has come back to haunt me in my imagination. I’m looking forward to all the time I’m going to spend there as I write. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

Shopping for Prom

Yesterday I had an entirely new cultural experience.  I went shopping for a prom dress!  No, not for myself.  That would be a little, well… weird.  But for my goddaughter, Rashel.  Rashel’s been living with me and my partner, Suse, for the last couple of months.  It’s the last year of school and while Suse and I have been focusing on making sure Rashel gets to school on time, her homework done, obtains all those credits she needs to graduate, and lives on something other than her preferred diet of junk food, Rashel has been somewhat obsessed about prom. 

 

When I was a kid in the UK we never had any of these strange and grandiose rites of passage that the Americans seem to have for pretty much every stage of their children’s existence.  At the end of fifth year, when most of my fellow students departed out into the world, we may have had a disco in the assembly hall—a dingy affair with tinny music, pop and crisps, and a couple of flashing “disco lights.”  And after I finished my last ‘A’ level exam, the only “rite” we had was to go round to each of our teachers and return our books. 

 

“Bye now, have a nice life,” from a relieved-looking Mr. Parker as we handed over our copies of Paradise Lost and Tess of the d’Ubervilles.  That was about the extent of any ceremony for us. 

 

But here in the States, where they do, after all, have rather a knack for making everything somewhat larger than it needs to be, senior prom is a BIG deal.

 

“I’ve developed my budget for prom,” Rashel told Suse and me a few weeks ago.  (Suse is equally clueless about all this too, having grown up in Germany where I don’t think they even bothered with the disco.  And if they had, Suse probably wouldn’t have known because she was too busy listening to heavy rock on the headphones in her bedroom. I get the impression she was a bit of a recluse back then.) 

 

“You should be doing your homework,” was my response to Rashel. 

 

“I only need a thousand dollars.”

 

“What?”

 

“Five hundred for my dress and…”

 

Let me put this in context. Neither Suse nor I have ever spent five hundred dollars on any single item of clothing and I think it’s likely that Suse may not have spent five hundred dollars on clothes during the whole of last year.  (Neither of us are what you might call fashion plates.)

 

“Jesus Christ, Rashel.  That’s a waste of money for something you’ll never wear again.”

 

“No it’s not.  It’s the most important night of my life.”

 

She then proceeded to tell us about the additional funds needed for shoes, hair, nails, jewelry, transportation, hotel room for the party afterwards.  And in doing so began to revise her budget.  Upwards. 

 

Crikey, I thought.  No wonder the entire United States is dying in a pool of debt.  They spent it all on their kids’ proms. 

 

Anyway, to cut a long story short, after much discussion (during which I began to remind myself more and more of my own mother by beginning sentences with phrases like “When I was your age…” and “Kids these days…”) I agreed to go shopping with Rashel for a prom dress.

 

We went to the mall.  I hate the mall.  We went to Nordstrom where a shop assistant in a blond wig and too much make-up managed to be ingratiating and condescending at the same time (quite a skill set!). Rashel spent a thousand years trying on dresses and didn’t like any of them.  We went to Blossoms, the place I’m told, where most of the girls get their dresses.  Apparently most girls like complicated sequin-bedecked things that I think it would be more appropriate to call contraptions than dresses.  On several occasions I was called in to assist in figuring out which strap went where and which thing was supposed to be attached to what.  (Like I’d know.  Thankfully there were several shop assistants there for back-up.)  I was also required to take cellphone photos of each outfit for comparison purposes later. 

 

I felt like I’d fallen down a wormhole.  It would take eons before we got out of there.  And then there’d be the future visits to other malls in other towns.  “We have to go to the mall in San Francisco,” Rashel had told me.  “And Serramonte.  Serramonte’s best.  It’s far enough away that no one from school will go there.  So no one will have the same dress as me. That would be a disaster!”  I could already see the month ahead.  Every spare moment spent helping to pick out a dress.  I wanted to cry.

 

When we left Blossoms I was exhausted and Rashel was despondent.  She’d tried on several dresses that she’d looked at on the internet (while she was supposed to be doing her homework) and none of them had looked quite right on her. 

 

“What about that shop over there?” I asked, trying to sound upbeat as I pointed to a little boutique across the mall.

 

“I don’t think so,” she answered in a tone indicating I’d just suggested we look for her dress at a Church jumble sale—the same tone she’d used every time I’d tried to pick out a dress from the rows and rows of them in Blossoms.

 

“Go on, take a look,” I said.  “You never know…”

 

“Oh, all right.”

 

She went there to take a quick look around and I popped into the Gap next door because, well, it had been a long time since Suse had bought new pants (we’re talking years here.) She’d say she didn’t need any.  That, I thought, was a matter for debate. Fifteen minutes later (after I’d bought a pair of pants at 30% off just because I agreed to open a Gap card account—so much for the credit crisis), I went into the dress shop. 

 

“I found it, I found my dress!” Rashel said, standing outside the dressing room in an item in which she looked undeniably stunning.  “And it’s a bargain.  Only $300!”

 

So, we bought it.  And had saved a couple of hundred bucks, I thought.  Until Rashel announced that this now left her with extra funds to spend on a purse and the extra-elaborate hairdo she’d need to really make an impression at the prom.  I could have argued but right then I didn’t have the strength.

 

The Beautiful Susan Boyle

 

It’s a funny world we live in.  A chubby forty-seven-year-old woman who lives alone with her cat and admits she’s never been kissed stands on a stage and proves that she can sing—beautifully. And she becomes an overnight worldwide sensation.  If you haven’t heard about Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent by now, you’re not living on planet earth. 

 

But why all the attention?

 

I’m not asking this question because I doubt the possibility of a middle-aged woman who doesn’t fit our contemporary notions of attractiveness actually having a gorgeous singing voice.  I’m asking it because I wonder, why the hell is everyone so amazed?  

 

Oh, right, I remember.  We live in a culture that defines women by their appearance.  A culture that, while it has kidded itself that we’ve got gender equality, that women have been “liberated,” deeply believes that a wide-hipped, double-chinned, middle-aged woman could not possibly impress anyone.  Did you see those rolled eyes, hear the sniggers, watch Simon Cowell’s even-more-contemptuous-than-usual sneer as Susan Boyle stepped onto the stage?  Of course she was going to make a fool of herself, everyone thought.  And isn’t that a huge part of the entertainment of these godawful shows?  Being able to laugh at the “old” and the “ugly” who have the audacity to think that they might actually have talent? 

 

But Susan Boyle did have that audacity.  She also has incredible talent.  We watch that video of her and we are shocked.  Because, after all, how could an “ugly” middle-aged woman have something to offer the world?  Wow, how cynical are we?

 

Or is it that we’re also feeling validated? Energized? Loving the way that Susan Boyle is saying a big “fuck you!” to this culture that requires women entertainers, actors, performers to adhere to a ridiculously narrow (actually impossible) set of standards in order to have success?

 

I have every expectation that this lovely media/entertainment/body fascist industry will ingest and reshape her (literally and figuratively).  But I also hope with an enormous passion that they won’t. 

 

I’m almost the same age as Susan Boyle.  I’m turning 47 this year. And I am so freaking tired of being bombarded day in, day out by media images of women who look nothing like my ordinary-looking self.  I’m sick of being fed impossible botoxed, plastic-surgeryed, airbrushed, photoshopped pictures of women on billboards, in magazines, on television and in movies.  I’m sick of seeing middle-aged women on talk shows praised for “how good” they look (i.e. how effectively they’re battling the aging process) while their real talents and accomplishments play second fiddle.

 

Isn’t it about time we get real? Women come in all shapes and sizes.  We age.  We get wrinkles and double chins and stomachs that aren’t flat as washboards. Not all of us have pneumatic breasts (and a considerable number of us don’t actually want them).  Most of us live past forty.  And we still have something important and beautiful and amazing to contribute to the world. 

 

Isn’t it about time we embraced all this reality instead of feeling bad about it?  It’s time women of all sizes and ages and shapes are represented in the media.  I, for one, want to see all the Susan Boyle’s of the world get onstage and sing their little hearts out.

Living on a Fault Line

Some of the flowers in our yard today

 I moved to California in 1989, just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake, a rollicking 7.1 on the Richter Scale.  The moment the earthquake hit I had just turned the key in the ignition of my friend’s truck and for a couple of stunned moments I thought that something was terribly wrong with it.  We’d retrieved it from the mechanic just the day before.  “What the hell’s up?” I said, convinced that the mechanic had done something terrible to the engine.  Then I realized that it was, in fact, the ground that was moving.  Panicked, my immediate instinct was to jump out of the truck. 

 

“No, don’t!” my friend said as I put my hand on the door handle.  She, a long-time California resident who knew the earthquake drill, was afraid that I might get crushed if the vehicle tipped over.  So I stayed put in a truck that bucked and jumped as wildly as a rodeo horse. 

 

The quake lasted no more than fifteen seconds but it felt like a lot longer.  We were parked at the Berkeley Marina, a place that is built on landfill.  And landfill, I later discovered, is potentially the most dangerous place to be in a quake.  It acts like jello that’s been shaken, amplifying the earth’s movement.  And it’s subject to what’s known as “liquefaction” in a quake so that what felt like solid earth becomes liquid.  Buildings sink into the ground and collapse, gas lines buckle, fires break out—which is what happened to San Francisco’s Marina District in 1989. 

 

The Berkeley Marina is an open-air park.  We weren’t in danger.  But we certainly felt the earth move that day.  A lot.  And though I’ve been through many shakers since then, I’ve never felt anything on the scale of what I felt on October 17, 1989.  As we drove home along streets with no traffic lights and finally found an on-air radio station amid the static, I wasn’t surprised to discover that a section of the Bay Bridge had fallen down.  Nor was I surprised later to find out that the Cypress Structure of the 880 freeway in West Oakland hand collapsed.  That day became an enormous lesson for me about the fact that nothing is permanent—even enormous bridges and massive freeway overpasses.  When even the earth beneath our feet shifts and shakes and no longer feels solid, it’s hard to know what to hold on to.

 

Perhaps I am writing about this today because it is the anniversary of my mother’s death.  On April 18^th, 2005, I received a telephone call.  It was an unspeakably beautiful spring day in Oakland just like it is today.  Our yard was filled with blooming flowers—freesias, monkey flowers, native irises, gladioli, cape honey suckle, jasmine, cherry blossom.  The birds were singing.  The sun was shining and it was close to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  While I observed all this from the porch of our house, my father told me that less than an hour before he had discovered my mother dead.  Later that week, after I’d flown home, I learned that my mother had died of a heart attack.  She was sixty-five, just retired.  She’d seemed in exceptionally good health. 

 

Though my mother’s death was my own personal earthquake, she was not my solid ground.  Never had been.  She and I had an incredibly difficult and contentious relationship.  But still, it was a relationship I had taken for granted.  She was my mother.  And our mothers are in so many ways our earth—the place we spring from, the people who define us.  In my case, my mother was the person that I defined myself against.  And so, when she was gone I was left reeling. Who was I now?  And though I’d tried to inoculate myself against all the disappointments I’d had in our relationship, when she died, I felt them like I never had before. 

 

I spent a year immersed in a grief so all encompassing that when I think back on that time I imagine myself a chrysalis.  I wrapped a cocoon around myself.  I stayed still, inward-looking.  I spent hours just staring out the window onto our yard.

 

That period somehow reminds me of the year after the Loma Prieta earthquake.  It was my first year in California.  I was homesick.  I missed England’s verdant vegetation, its dark and fallow winter fields.  I missed the shifting shapes of clouds, the scent of fish and chips wafting onto a busy high street, people who could make a decent cup of tea.  I missed simply living in a culture that was familiar.  Back home, no one looked at me blank-faced after I’d made a joke.  And all during this time, there were those clusters of sometimes large and frightening aftershocks.  What the hell was I doing here? I asked myself. Of course, then I could just have gotten on a plane and gone back to England.  There’s no getting away from grief. 

 

During that year after my mother’s death I took piles of books out of the library about grief.  I went—for a couple of weeks, at least—to a support group.  Like so many things, I thought if I understood it then perhaps I’d be able to get over it.  But what I learned is that grief is simply something that moves through a person at its own pace.  Like getting used to a new place, a new continent, it takes a lot of time.  And even though we adapt, what we’ve left behind is always with us. I can write about my mother’s death today and not break down about it.  But there are tears leaking from my eyes. 

 

I’ve grown to love California.  The sun, the warmth, the immense and awe-inspiring landscape, its incredible diversity—in people, cultures and ecologies.  I love it so much that I stay here despite the fact that we have Arnold Schwarzenegger as our governor, that its voters recently outlawed same-sex marriage, and that we live in one of the most active earthquake zones on earth.  Denial is a requirement of going about your daily life in the Bay Area.  You don’t think too much about the next earthquake, the real “big one,” the one the seismologists say will happen.  It’s just a matter of time.

 

The same way I’ve adapted to this place, I’ve grown used to my mother’s death.  But I emerged from that cocoon of grief and I’d become someone different.  Earthquakes and death change everything.  In a matter of moments—a mere fifteen seconds, or the time it takes to pick up the telephone—the world as you know it can be transformed.  I emerged from my grief with a knowledge, an understanding, of mortality that I never had before.  My mother had no more time.  But I did.  I’d better make the most of it. 

 

 

 

My mum. Having fun.